The Day Before Midnight

they’d cut through it and seal the silo off forever. Puller hated what he couldn’t control, and he couldn’t control this. But there wouldn’t be a party until he had his Tac Air, because you don’t send boys in without Tac Air.

They could go soon now.

But Dick didn’t want to move until he knew more. Patience, he thought, patience was the answer. Already Washington was on the horn wanting results. That was shaping up as the hardest battle. But he would wait. There had to be another angle, and he would find it.

He lit a cigarette, one of his beloved Marlboros, felt it cut deep into his lungs. He coughed.

“Sir,” it was one of the Commo specialists, overexcited as usual. “Sir, look.”

Someone else came running into the room, too, a state policeman, and then one of the army Commo teams.

“Look, Colonel Puller. Jesus, look.”

Puller raised his glasses to his eyes and saw that a dark blur had suddenly obscured the mountaintop.

“What is it?” someone yelled. Other men were fumbling with binoculars.

Puller concentrated on the dark stain that now lay draped over the mountain. He gauged it to be about five hundred square feet, undulating slightly, black and blank.

It made no sense at all.

And then he had it.

“It’s a goddamned tarpaulin,” he said. “They’re covering up. They don’t want us to see what they’re doing up there.”

God damn them, he thought.

In the uproar he almost missed Uckley telling him softly that someone had tracked down the man who’d created South Mountain, a guy named Peter Thiokol.

Poo Hummel was at an age where she liked everybody, even men in her bedroom with guns. She liked Herman. And Herman seemed to like her right back. Herman was big and blond and all dressed in black, from his boots to his shirt. His gun was black too. Despite his size, he had gentle eyes — and the bumbling mannerisms of a well-trained circus bear. Not an atom of his body radiated anything except an awesome desire to please. He loved her pink room and especially her toys, which were displayed on shelving her daddy had built. One by one, he took her animals down and studied them with massive concentration. He liked Care Bear and Pound Puppy and all her Pretty Ponies (she had almost a dozen). He liked Rainbow Brite and Rub-A-Dub Doggy and Peanut Butter too. He liked them all.

“This one is very pretty,” he said. It was her favorite, too, a unicorn with a bright pink polyester mane.

Poo was no longer upset that her mother would not stop crying down in the kitchen and that Bean was so quiet. For Poo, it was a great big adventure to have new friends, especially like Herman.

“Will you ever go away?” she asked, squinching up her nose and making a face.

“Sure,” he said. “Soon. I gotta go. I gotta job.”

“You’re a nice man,” she said. “I like you.”

“I like you, too, nice little girl,” he said, smiling.

She liked his teeth especially. He had the whitest, friendliest smile she’d ever seen.

“I want to go out,” she said.

“Oh, no, Poo,” he said. “Just for a little while longer you have to be inside with Herman. We can be chums. Best buddies. Pals. Okay? Then you can go out and play and it will be all fun. You’ll have a good time, you’ll see. It’ll be great fun for everybody. And Herman will bring you a present. I’ll bring you a new Pretty Pony, all right? A pink one. A pink unicorn, just like the one you have there, all right, little girl?”

“C’n I have a drink of water?” Poo asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you a story.”

Peter Thiokol was rambling.

He could feel his sentence trail off in a bramble of unrelated clauses, imprecise thoughts, and hopelessly mixed metaphors until it lost its way altogether and surrendered to incoherence.

“Um, so, um, it’s the decapitation theory that holds, you see, that a surgical strike aimed at leadership bunkers, if it should come, and of course we all hope it won’t, anyway, um …”

The note card before him was no help.

It simply said, in his almost incomprehensible scrawl, “Decapitation theory — explain.”

Their faces were so bored. One girl chewed gum and focused on the lights. A boy looked angrily into space. Someone was reading the feature section of The Sun.

It wasn’t a great day in 101, the big lecture room in the basement of Shaffer Hall on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where Peter Thiokol convened Strategic Theory, an Introduction three times a week for an ever-shrinking group of undergrads, most of whom wanted to be M.D.s anyway. How do you reach these damned kids?

Just make it interesting, one of his new colleagues had suggested.

But it is interesting, Peter had said.

He struggled to find his focus, a problem he’d been having ever since the problems with Megan.

“Decapitation, of course, is from head cutting-off of, that is, it’s the idea that you could paralyze a whole society by sort of removing, like in the French Revolution, with the, um, the guillotine, the—”

“Uh, Dr. Thiokol?”

Ah! A question! Peter Thiokol loved it when someone in his class asked a question, because it got him off the hook, even if for just a minute or two. But there were hardly ever any questions.

“Yes?” he said eagerly. He couldn’t see who had spoken.

“Uh,” an attractive girl asked, “are we going to get our midterms back before we have the final?”

Peter sighed, seeing the pile of exams, ragged blue booklets smeared with incomprehensible chickentracks in ballpoint, sitting on the table next to his bed. He’d read a few, then lost interest. They were so boring.

“Well, I’m almost done with them,” he lied. “And yes, you will get them back before the final. But maybe nuclear war will break out and we’ll have to cancel the final.”

There was some laughter, but not much. Peter lurched onward, trying to relocate his direction. He had expected to be so much better at this, because he loved to show off so for Megan.

“You show off very well, I must admit,” Megan Wilder, his ex-wife, had once said. “It’s your second greatest talent, after thinking up ways to end the world.”

The teaching had seemed to offer so much after his breakdown — a new start, a sense of freedom from the pressures of the past, a new city, new opportunities, a discipline he loved. But the kids turned out not to be very interesting to him, nor he to them. They just sat there. Their faces blurred after a while. They were so passive. And this performing took so much out of him. He went home at night bleached out, too tired to think or remember.

He’d just stare at the phone, trying to figure out if he should call Megan or not, and praying that she’d call him.

The memory was still brittle. He’d even seen her two weeks ago, in a wretched, maybe heroic, attempt at reconciliation. She’d simply showed up after months of staying out of touch. For a night it had been spectacular, a greedy carnival of flesh and wanting; but in the morning the old business was there, his guilt, her guilt, the various deceits, the betrayals, his narcissism, her vanity, his bomb, his fucking bomb, as she called it, the whole ugly pyramid of it.

“Anyway,” he said, still scattered, “urn, on decapitation stuff, um — look, let’s be frank here.” He had this sudden weary urge to cut through to the truth.

“Write this down. Decapitation is about killing a few thousand people to save a few million or billion people. The idea is that Soviet society is so centralized and authority-crazed that if you kill the top few, you wreck them. So you build a missile that’s really an intercontinental sniper rifle. You become the guy in Day of the Jackal. The only problem is, they can do it to us, too.”

They looked at him dumbly. Not even murder touched them.

He sighed again.

And so the mighty have fallen. The great Peter Thiokol, magna cum laude, Harvard, a Rhodes scholar, a master’s in nuclear engineering from M.I.T., a Ph.D. in international relations from Yale, golden boy of the Defense